An unmanned
prototype for a new astronaut escape pod launched high above the Virginia coast
early Wednesday during a NASA test flight.

The bullet-shaped
escape ship blasted off at 6:26 a.m. EDT (1026 GMT) today from a seaside pad at
Wallops Island, Va., during the successful test. The vehicle is an alternative
design to one planned to carry astronauts to safety during launch emergencies for
NASA?s new Orion spacecraft. Orion capsules will replace the agency's aging space shuttle fleet and are slated to make their first operational flight by 2015.

?Everything,
preliminarily, looks like it was a good test,? said Keith Koehler, a spokesman
for NASA?s Wallops Flight Facility. ?To say the team is very excited about the launch
this morning is an understatement.?

The prototype
escape ship is not meant to replace the tower-based abort system selected for the
Orion spacecraft. But data gleaned from today?s test flight may help shape that
accepted Orion system, which is slated to make its first launch abort test
later this year.

?There is
data that they?ll be sharing,? Koehler told SPACE.com.

Called the
Max Launch Abort System, or MLAS, the alternative design launched primarily as
a technology
demonstrator and to help the independent NASA Engineering and Safety Center
at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., gain experience in flight tests,
NASA officials have said.

During
Wednesday?s test, the MLAS vehicle rose high above the Virginia coast,
jettisoned its engine ring and then deployed parachutes from its bullet-shaped
shell as it began to fall back toward Earth. The shell popped free from a
full-size mock up of an Orion
crew capsule a short time later, which then deployed its own parachutes and
splashed down in the shallow waters of the Atlantic Ocean near the Wallops
Island coast.

?The flight
was a little less than a minute,? Koehler said.

Mission
planners expected the MLAS prototype to launch as high as a mile (1.6 km) into
the sky during the test, which had been delayed since late June due to weather
and final work required on the vehicle. The test had an estimated cost of about
$30 million, NASA officials have said.

Spaceship
escape

NASA?s
Orion spacecraft will use a proven abort system that uses a rocket engine
mounted to tower atop the vehicle?s cone-shaped crew capsule to rip the vehicle
free of its Ares I rocket during a launch emergency and carry astronauts to
safety. The first operational Orion flights are slated to begin no earlier than
2015 under NASA?s plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.

Similar escape
systems were used during NASA?s Apollo and Mercury programs during the 1960s
and 1970s, though the two-man Gemini vehicles that flew in between featured
ejection seats instead of an abort tower. Ejection seats were also aboard the
first test flights for NASA?s space shuttle fleet, but were later removed.

A recent
U.S. Air Force study has questioned
whether the current Orion Launch Abort System is powerful enough to safely
propel astronauts away from a launch emergency. But NASA officials have said
that supercomputer analyses will show that their chosen launch abort system will
work.

Unlike the
Orion system, which places a single escape motor in a top-mounted tower, the
MLAS system uses four rocket engines distributed around a booster ring at the base of the
snub-nosed capsule. The flight test vehicle launched today resembled a
white bullet with stubby wings attached.

It stood 33
feet (10 meters) tall and weighed about 45,000 pounds (20,411 kg). NASA named
the Max Launch Abort System after Maxime ?Max? Faget, a pioneering Mercury-era
engineer who holds the patent for the rocket escape tower concept.

Koehler
said MLAS engineers have begun analyzing the data collected during today?s
launch test. A recovery team is expected to retrieve the test vehicle from the shallow
Atlantic waters off Virginia?s coast on Thursday, he added.